Why is DDr RAM more expensive than DDR2?

[XabbaRus]

Title says it all. I ordered up the wrong RAM based on what my system was telling me and didn't find out till I opened the case and had a look. Fortunatley I can send it back but DDR RAM is twice the price.

[antikristuseke]

Because DDR ram is pretty much out of production and is more of a nishe product than mainstream unlike DDR2

[XabbaRus]

Bummer if your PC is only 2 1/2 years old and plenty of life left in it.

[FIREWALL]

Same reason AGP vid card is more expensive than PCI-E.

Old tech = more money :p

[antikristuseke]

Originally Posted by XabbaRus

Bummer if your PC is only 2 1/2 years old and plenty of life left in it.

I know, as you can see from my signature im on DDR ram aswell.

[sonar732]

Who can forget RAMBUS's hipe?

[kiwi_2005]

Its like in some cases AGP graphic cards are dearer than PCI-E. Brand new still in its wrapping but because its old it dearer!

[SUBMAN1]

Because DDR is better! Not kidding. Give me my low latency any day over something that didn't need to go any faster, at least not yet. I bet a DDR based machine running a CPU intensive benchmark will outperform a DDR2 based machine given identical CPU's and everything else identical.

-S

[stabiz]

Oki-doki.

[nikimcbee]

Originally Posted by antikristuseke

Because DDR ram is pretty much out of production and is more of a nishe product than mainstream unlike DDR2

I can answer that question! I work in the DDR2 industry. You are right on the money! The market is currently flooded with DDR2 RAM, thus, lowering the price....dammit. We make more money selling the older product, because the chip market isn't flooded with it.

[XabbaRus]

OK niki can you send me 4 x 1GB stick of PC3200 DDR please?

[sonar732]

I remember the pricing system of automotive parts being insane. We had three prices that would dictate how much comission the salesperson would get. John Doe's would get the highest price, body repair shops would get the next, and finally other dealers would get the cheapest. How about hooking us up Niki?

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by stabiz

Oki-doki.

Trust me. You never hit 6.4 GB/sec bandwidth for system memory (maybe a file server of some sort might, but not a desktop). What you transfer is a ton of tiny files while your system is in operation. For a large texture transfer such as that found on video cards, higher speed ram is important. For system memory, latency actually is more important simply because each transcation has to wait a latency time before it is able to read and write. So a DDR2 module that has a latency time of say 5 ns, has to wait 5 ns each and every time a transaction is done before it can start completing. A DDR module at 2 ns may not have the throughput of a DDR2 module, but the DDR module is already transfering 2x to 2.5x faster than the DDR2 module.

So for the typical system that transfers millions of tiny files through memory all day long, it doesn't take rocket science to figure out that latency is going to outperform throughput in a scenario like this.

On a completely different subject, your computer never needs 6.4 GB / sec (The speed of stadard DDR2 at 800 MHz, and this is the exact same speed of DDR in dual channel mode at 400 MHz). You computer will never utilize this throughput already - in testing, maybe half of this speed is utilized on a constant basis. System memory is following video card memory, and always has, so maybe they are just making us buy new memory for a new sale without benefit to us. Actually, this may be a negative benefit to us in normal daily transactions.

This makes me question why we had DDR2 shoved down our throats?

Does anyone remember RAMBUS? RAMBUS is like DDR2 in performance, yet back when the heat was on between the competing formats, and all the testing was done, you always had the lower latency DDR outperforming the higher throughput RAMBUS??? Same deal today, but I guess the march of technology must move forward, even if its not in a positive sense.

[...gets off soapbox....]

-S

PS. I just figured it out - this is being pushed because some boards use IGP's with shared memory. This is being pushed on us to be compatible with those, and still make it easy on the consumer to figure out what the proper memory to buy for their system. No other reason I can think of. Video cards need throughput over latency for large textures, so IGP's can perform OK on system RAM if its got the throughput.

[XabbaRus]

my mobo has an IGP when no 3rd party card is being used but still it is DDR, I was a bit shocked when I looked at teh latency of my 256MB stick and saw it is 2.5 CL where the wrong DDR2 Ram I got is 5 CL.

[antikristuseke]

There is more to ram timings than just CAS latency, allso there are quite a few reasons why DDR and DDR2 are incompatible. Firstly its the pin layout and they both use diferent protocols when accesing and storing things in memory.